By Eugyppius
A Plague Chronicle
November 29, 2025
Yesterday, a thing happened, and because I did not immediately post about this thing that happened, some angry internet person complained about what he believes to be my hypocrisy or my indifference as to this thing that happened.
Ordinarily I strive to ignore angry internet people, but sometimes they inspire entire essays, and this is one of those times. You want me to post about the thing, butthurt internet person? Okay, I'll post about the thing.
You may not like what I'm going to post, but I'm going to post it anyway, because now I need to get all of this off my chest.
The thing that happened, is that an American living in Berlin had his house raided by the police and his computer confiscated, all because he published a book with a swastika on the cover:
A court had previously convicted the same man for tweeting the cover art from this selfsame book with the selfsame swastika.
Things like this happen because Section 86a of the German criminal code forbids disseminating the slogans and symbols of "unconstitutional organisations," and the swastika is one such slogan or symbol. 86a is a stupid outdated law and it needs to go away because nobody deserves to be prosecuted or investigated for propaganda offences, however personally abrasive, politically misguided and intellectually lazy he may be.
I'll say that again even more clearly, lest you mistake me:
What authorities are doing to this man is wrong and he doesn't deserve this. He doesn't deserve this even though he's demonstrated incredible imprudence in this instance and in others too. He doesn't deserve this even though he is himself eager to accuse me and others of imaginary National Socialist tendencies, much like the German speech police themselves. And he doesn't deserve this even though he is on record approving of Section 86a of the German criminal code, the very law that is being used to persecute him. However much he may challenge our sympathy, however incurably myopic his beliefs, this man doesn't deserve what is happening to him.
At the same time, you need to know that my posting about this stuff isn't going to stop it. I don't have any answers here, and I don't have any power either. It's not like the more words Eugyppius throws at this problem, the harder the job of the speech police will be. These guys actually seek out publicity; they're proud of what they're doing. Here they are having a laugh about it on American national television:
Nevertheless, I've posted and posted and posted and posted about speech repression in Germany, so angry butthurt internet people will have to forgive me for being a little late to respond to the all-hands-on-deck outrage alarm in this particular case.
What is happening to our American friend in Berlin is bad but it's also pretty middle-of-the-road as far as German speech harassment goes. Lots of Germans have been punished much more heavily for doing much less, and I've carefully catalogued almost every single case that has made it into the press over the years. 1 As far as I know, I'm the only person doing this in English at all. Most speech police victims don't get any write-ups in the Atlantic. Matt Taibbi doesn't give them interviews and Die Zeit could care less about them.
So I'm really, sincerely sorry that an American got caught up in this stupid shit. Germany has become a scary and unpredictable place because it is ruled by hapless insecure morons who can't handle even the mildest criticism. Our well-meaning antiracist liberal is not being singled out for unusual repressions; everybody in Germany who types things into the internet, whether he realises it or not, exposes himself to this selfsame risk. I've rearranged many aspects of my life to account for this risk. I try not to spend more than a few weeks in the same place, I avoid all real-life events associated with my online persona, and I wake up every morning at 5am to ensure that I'm logged out of everything and that all of my devices are powered off in advance of any 6am police raid to seize my electronic devices. (It's not that bad, I use this time for some pleasant early-morning reading.)
From its inception in 1949, the Federal Republic has always had illiberal speech laws. The state has become particularly repressive since Covid, but the authoritarian streak is not new. When I lived in the United States, these illiberal aspects of the German state occasionally came up in conversation. My American colleagues regarded them as mild curiosities, as potentially regrettable but also understandable in light of German history. In this their assessments mirrored those of our American friend, who spoke as follows during his speech crime trial in January 2024:
Hopkins underscored that he was all in favour of the law in question. "I like this law. I don't want Nazis to wave swastika flags in the streets of Berlin. I am a free speech absolutist, but I make an exception in this case to account for Germany's particular history." He said that it had been obvious that he had used the swastika in his tweets to oppose Nazism, to oppose totalitarianism and to warn his readers about it. He then asked the court that, if it had to convict him, to at least admit that his prosecution was about him opposing pandemic measures and not to fight people who sympathise with the Nazis as per the actual spirit of the law. In his well worded - if overly long - statement, he alleged pretty openly that the court would be working as part of a totalitarian system, and not in the name of democracy, if it were to convict him.
The narrow point to make here, is that 86a specifically is not the statute that keeps Nazis off Berlin streets. The German state has other tools for that. 86a has a much broader purpose, namely to prevent the normalisation of symbols and slogans associated with "unconstitutional organisations." There have been no misunderstandings here; the Berlin prosecutors have not mistaken our American for a neo-Nazi. They have simply identified him as a swastika normaliser, because his use of the swastika did not make his rejection of the symbol immediately apparent. That's dumb, but it's the same standard applied in many other cases too. Below, I'll talk about the big-picture strategy behind prosecutions like this, because obviously not even the German state is that interested in wholly suppressing the defunct trappings of Nazi propaganda. The narrow motivations of Berlin prosecutors are simpler, and we can get those out of the way right now. There is just a lot of pressure to prosecute as many internet speech crimes as possible in current-year Germany. The game is to maximise the numbers and go after everybody they can because they believe the internet is a bad dangerous place and they want people to invest less of their lives in unapproved online discourse. Berlin prosecutors also seem to have a personal, punitive agenda in this case, which explains the totally unnecessary raid and device seizure. Probably they're assblasted over the negative publicity our American generated in the course of his first trial. We've seen these kinds of prosecutorial vendettas before, for example in the case of Stefan Neihoff.
Of course the broader point to make here is about the wisdom of laws preventing "Nazis" from "wav[ing] swastika flags in the streets of Berlin" more generally, because while 86a isn't the precise wrench for this bolt, it is part of a bigger statutory (and constitutional) toolkit that includes this among its purposes. Aside from a few thousand totally irrelevant lunatics - no few of whom are probably federal agents - there are no longer any self-proclaimed Nazis in Germany. As long as these laws are on the books, they are therefore an invitation for the state to go out and find people whom state agents deem to be Nazis because they believe their words and opinions are worthy of repression. The state decides here - not me, not any American satirist, and not anybody else. It could be that 90% of the time, you agree that these hypothetical flag-wavers need to be tried for political crimes. Otherwise, you just have to accept that the state is going to go after people whose speech and opinions you'd prefer to see protected. That is the expense of defensive democracy. Speech crime prosecutions for sarcastic use of the swastika, the stress of living in this retarded police system, the fact that they can come after you for anything - all of these are what you have to pay for the extravagance of a law that you believe may disadvantage your imaginary political enemies.
This brings us to the Nazi Cult. To justify the repression of its critics, the state must withdraw National Socialism from its historical context and reconstruct this defunct party and ideology as a timeless spectre haunting the Federal Republic. Anything the state doesn't like or that state actors find threatening or merely unpalatable or tiresome must be forced into the Nazi mould. Thus Nazism becomes a plastic thing, infinitely malleable, reconstructed and adjusted in the moment according to whatever it is establishment politicians, leading media pundits and NGO activists don't like. "Racism" makes you a Nazi, opposing mass migration makes you a Nazi, voting for the AfD makes you a Nazi, Euroscepticism might make you a Nazi, and opposition to regime side projects like the energy transition or pandemic prevention makes you various flavours of "denier," which is analogous to denying the Holocaust, which is what Nazis do. Our dyspeptic American is an eager participant in the Nazi Cult; he too sees Nazis everywhere, and in this way he feeds the cult that is presently causing him so much trouble.